By DINITIA SMITH

. D. Salinger's daughter, Margaret, is
visiting New York from Boston and staying
at the Plaza Hotel, under an assumed name.
There are Salinger "crazies" out there, Ms.
Salinger says, who have written menacing
letters to her family. And then there is the
possibility that her famously private father
will try to stop her from publishing her
memoir, "Dream Catcher," due out on
Wednesday from Pocket Books.

Mr. Salinger, 81, who has not published
anything since 1965 and has not spoken
publicly for years, is so determined in his
seclusion that he successfully delayed the
publication of a biography by Ian Hamilton
because Mr. Hamilton had sought to use
some of his letters.

"Ian Hamilton thought my dad would be
so proud of him and sent him the galleys,"
said Ms. Salinger. "I know better."

Ms. Salinger has written a book that reveals not only her own life but previously
unknown and deeply intimate aspects of her
father's life. Her motivation in breaching
his zealously guarded privacy is likely to be
questioned by many who criticized Joyce
Maynard's 1998 memoir, which included
details of her romance with Mr. Salinger
when she was 18 and he was 53. Last year's
auction of letters that Mr. Salinger wrote to
Ms. Maynard in the early 1970's also
prompted criticism. The letters were bought
by the California software entrepreneur and
philanthropist Peter Norton, who returned
them to Mr. Salinger.

Ms. Salinger says she is willing to take the
risk that her father might not speak to her
again. And then of course there is the possibility that the public might see her book as
an attempt to trade on his name. In any case
she has written it, Ms. Salinger says, to
make sense of her strange childhood. And
she has come to New York to promote the
book.

The Plaza is a place of happy memories,
where she used to stay with her father when
they visited her godfather, William Shawn,
the editor of the New Yorker. She is looking
at photographs in her book about her handsome young father, beaming as she learns to
walk, as she sits on his shoulders, plays the
piano.

"He loves me," said Ms. Salinger, as if
surprised. "Isn't he sexy! How funny he
was." And she looks like him, too, tall, with
the same long face and dark eyes.

Her father loved her, but he was also
pathologically self-centered, Ms. Salinger says.

Nothing could interrupt
his work, which he likened to a quest
for enlightenment. He was also abusive toward her mother, Claire Douglas, Ms. Salinger says, keeping her a
virtual prisoner in his house in Cornish, N.H., refusing to allow her to
see friends and family. Ms. Salinger
said that her father feared the female body and that when Ms. Douglas was pregnant, he found her abhorrent. She said that since her parents rarely had sex, she feels her
birth was almost an accident.

Mr. Salinger's agent, Phyllis Westberg of Harold Ober Associates, said
he would not comment on his daughter's book.

Ms. Salinger also says that when
she was 13 months old, her mother
planned to kill her and commit suicide, and did indeed burn the house
down later. Ms. Salinger said her
mother denied setting the fire. Ms.
Douglas is now a Jungian analyst in
California and "a terrific grandma,"
Ms. Salinger said.

Ms. Douglas did not respond to
messages left on her answering machine in California.

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He spoke in tongues, fasted until
he turned greenish and as an older
man had pen pal relationships with
teenage girls.

After her parents divorced in 1966,
her father continued to be part of her
life. She stayed with him at times in
Cornish.

Does he know about her book?
"He does now," said Ms. Salinger,
because of newspaper articles.

Has
she spoken to him since them? She
laughs.

"I may be 44," she said. "But
I still don't want to get yelled at."

Still, "it's not unusual at all to not
speak for several months," said Ms.
Salinger. "Particularly because he's
very deaf," and for a long time refused to wear a hearing aid, she
added.

Her father
loves her, she said, but "he probably
hates my guts, too, I would say, operatically."

Ms. Salinger said she wrote
"Dream Catcher" because "I was
absolutely determined not to repeat
with my son what had been done with
me."

"There is something to be said for
the examined life," she said.

Lotte Jacobi/ UP Newspictures

J. D. Salinger in 1953.

FROM THE ARCHIVES

"Mr. Salinger, whose work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere, tells a story
well, in this case under the special difficulties of casting it in the form of Holden's first-
person narrative. This was a perilous undertaking, but one that has been successfully
achieved. Mr. Salinger's rendering of teen-age speech is wonderful: the unconscious
humor, the repetitions, the slang and profanity, the emphasis, all are just right. Holden's
mercurial changes of mood, his stubborn refusal to admit his own sensitiveness and
emotions, his cheerful disregard of what is sometimes known as reality are typically and
heart breakingly adolescent." -- from the original New York Times Review of "The Catcher in the Rye," July 16, 1951.

There is one moment that stands
out above all, she said. "It is so
horrible, it's so powerful." When she
was pregnant and sick, instead of
offering help, her father "said I had
no right to bring a child into this
lousy world," she writes, "and he
hoped I was considering an abortion."

The book, she says, is her struggle
to make sense of it all.

The Salingers
have always been secretive, she said.
It is embodied in "Catcher in the
Rye": "My parents would have
about two hemorrhages apiece if I
told anything pretty personal about
them.

They're quite touchy about
anything like that."

From her Aunt Doris, her father's
sister who is six years older and in
failing health, Ms. Salinger said she
learned about her father's childhood
as Jerome David Salinger, son of
Miriam and Sol Salinger, who became a prosperous food merchant in
New York. Jerome grew up on the
Upper West Side and Park Avenue
and attended Valley Forge Military
Academy. He was the center of his
mother's life, Ms. Salinger said her
aunt told her.

But Miriam was also
overprotective. Mr. Salinger once
wrote in a letter to Hemingway that
his mother walked him to school
until he was 24, Ms. Salinger said.

He had always thought his parents
were Jewish, Ms. Salinger writes, but
when he was a teenager he discovered that they hid from him that his
mother was Irish Catholic. Still, he
experienced anti-Semitism, from
which he developed his aversion, expressed by his characters, for the Ivy
League, for "phonies."

During World War II he was a
counterintelligence agent assigned
to the Twelfth Regiment of the
Fourth Division, interrogating
POW's.

He served in the most brutal
campaigns of the European theater,
including D-Day and the Battle of the
Bulge. In 1945 in Germany he was
hospitalized for "battle fatigue."

In one of the book's surprises, Ms.
Salinger writes that her father arrested a young Nazi Party functionary, Sylvia, then married her. The
marriage was brief, and forever after he referred to her as Saliva.

Ms. Salinger's parents met in 1950
when Ms. Douglas was about 16 and
Mr. Salinger about 31, at the writer
Francis Steegmuller's apartment.
Ms. Douglas was born in England,
the daughter of the art critic and
dealer Robert Langton Douglas. Her
stepfather was a partner in Duveen
Brothers.

At the time Ms. Douglas and Mr.
Salinger met, he abstained from sex,
her mother told Ms. Salinger, because he was studying with an Indian
mystic who taught that it interfered
with enlightenment.

Ms. Salinger
quotes from "The Gospels of Sri Ramakrishna," written by the guru's
guru. An acolyte announces that he
and his wife have had intercourse:
"Don't you hate yourself for dallying
with a body which contains only
blood phlegm, filth and excreta?"
Ramakrishna asks.

Ms. Salinger noted that in Mr. Salinger's story "A
Perfect Day for Bananafish," the
character Seymour shoots himself
on his honeymoon.

Just months before her high school
graduation, Ms. Douglas married
Mr. Salinger and moved with him to
Cornish. Ms. Douglas told her daughter that he demanded elaborate
meals and that the sheets had to be
laundered twice weekly, though
there was no heat or hot water. When
her mother became pregnant, Ms.
Salinger writes, she had "a suicidal
depression when she realized that
her pregnancy only repulsed him."

Ms. Salinger was born in 1955, the
year her father's stories "Franny"
and "Raise High the Roof Beam,
Carpenters" were published in The
New Yorker.

Mr. Salinger wrote letters about
his joy in her, Ms. Salinger said.

He
was a playful father who seemed
easier in the magic world of childhood. Her imaginary friends were
real to him, too, she says, as were the
characters in his books. "The world
of fiction and reality were very
blurred," she writes.

But, her mother
felt "jealousy and rage over my replacement of her in my father's affections."

In 1960 the Salingers had a son,
Matthew, who is now an actor and
producer in California.

Last month
The Sunday Times of London quoted
him as saying of his sister: "I guess
she's got a lot of anger. But to write a
book just isn't right.

It's kind of pathetic." Ms. Salinger says she does
not believe he said it: "I love my
brother dearly.

It just doesn't sound
like him."

Attempts to reach him telephone
or through friends were not successful.

After his divorce in 1972 Mr. Salinger had a relationship with Ms. Maynard, the journalist, who was two
years older than his daughter.

To Ms.
Salinger it was a repeat of his relationship with her mother.

He induced her to leave college and live in
isolation with him, Ms. Maynard
wrote her own memoir of Mr. Salinger, "At Home in the World" (Picador U.S.A., 1998).

After a brief "impulsive" marriage to her karate instructor, Ms.
Salinger began pulling her life together. She graduated from Brandeis University with honors and received a degree in management
from Oxford University. She attended Harvard Divinity School and
trained as a nondenominational hospital chaplain. She is married to an
opera singer and actor -- she refuses
to give his name, or that of her son,
or her son's age. She wants to write
more books, she said, though she
would not say on what topics.

Today Mr. Salinger is married to
his third wife, Colleen, a nurse, some
50 years younger than he. "She's
lovely," Ms. Salinger said.

She cared
for Ms. Salinger for a time during
her pregnancy, she said, though Mr.
Salinger constantly asked her to
come home.

Ms. Salinger writes that
Mr. Salinger berates Colleen, as he
did her mother.

At one point the
couple was trying to have a child, Ms.
Salinger said.

Mr. Salinger still lives in Cornish.
The curtains in the house are drawn
nearly all the time, said Ms. Salinger.
She has seen his bedroom and study,
"probably twice in my life." Mr. Salinger is still writing, and lives on
royalties. "Catcher in the Rye" sells
"at least" 250,000 copies annually,
she said.

She said she did not know why Mr.
Salinger refused to publish his work.
"My aunt thinks he can't stand any
criticism," she said. "He sure doles
it out."

Ms. Salinger speaks with affection
of her father's early "lovely stories
in magazines he won't allow to be
published in books."

"He's stopped lecturing enough
and was telling a good story," she
said.

Later stories, like "Hapworth 16,
1924," are simply lectures, she says,
that she heard as a child. "He has
opinions on everything from how to
chew your food to proper breathing
techniques."

Toward the end of "Dream Catcher," Ms. Salinger writes that in giving up her dream of a perfect father,
memories of happy times with him
have returned.